Name, title and brief bio?

Mitch Lieberman, Managing Partner DRI, USA

Mitch has successfully helped businesses of all sizes to understand the importance of technology and culture; it is about balance. The focus needs to remain on the problem, appropriate solutions, and getting jobs done. Mitch takes a modern, unique, but practical view of customer strategy, process improvement, and technology optimization achieved by creating tight alignment between business strategy, goals and objectives.

His own personal balance is that of a practical view on today, as well as, a strong belief on where we are headed, and how this applies to many different types of businesses, cultures, and geographies.

When you designed and built this app, what problems were you looking to solve for SugarCRM users and how does the GetSatisfaction plugin solve those problems?

Communities should be used to bridge the gap from social media conversation to digital interactions with a purpose. Today many organizations are trying to figure out how to leverage social conversations and these new connections to deliver a better customer experience. Customer communities are great way to accomplish this goal. As much as we would like to do it, taking the online conversations people are having about your company in Facebook and Twitter and dumping them into a CRM system without a considered process, just does not provide a whole lot of value. As you have learned with forums, your customers really do want to connect with you and while the basics have not changed, customers expect more as does your business.

What unique or interesting ways does the GetSatisfaction plugin make it easy for users to use?

Users do not think about the fact that it is being used, it feels like a natural extension to SugarCRM and the CRM process. Does a user think about the Internet connection when they log into the application? It just works and makes their lives easier. In this case, the user of the plug-in itself is the business and not only does it bridge the gap, technically, among service, sales and marketing it brings the organization to together to discuss more important topics like customer experience and customer satisfaction.

What attracted you to being a part of the SugarCRM ecosystem?

I have been a part of the SugarCRM ecosystem longer than most; I have been part of the system (same login to SugarCRM.com ) for over 9 years. DRI has been a gold partner since 2005. I have taken a few breaks, but I keep coming back!

Are there any other apps you’d like to mention that you have either used or been involved with in the SugarCRM ecosystem?

We are actually seeing a lot of traction, in different regions with Act-On.

For someone who wants to create their own SugarCRM apps, what resources would you recommend that helped you?

Build the business case and bounce that off of business users. Technology is the easy part, once the business case is understood.

What is your vision for the GetSatisfaction plugin? What can we expect to see from DRI in the future?

A customer community allows you to collect and analyze data, derive insights about your customers that will then allow you to provide them with relevant, appropriate information at key points along the journey. Today’s forums, or customer communities, can be strongly linked to social networks in order to maximize insight, streamline campaigns, and drive organizational shift to bring your company into the social age. What you can expect from DRI is to focus on the whole customer experience, not just the sale, not just service, nor marketing – but how all the pieces connect, relate and solve the bigger questions of loyalty and satisfaction.